Midnight's Children

gga

Dense, detailed, loud, intense and, in a way, unrelenting. The world
is swirling around you and you’ve got no idea where to look but you
want to look everywhere right now! I’ve never been there, but this
book is what I imagine India is like. I don’t think that’s
unreasonable either as Rushdie seems to be wanting to tell the story
of India’s birth as a country.

This is another of those literary ‘magical realism’ novels that I find
much easier to describe as fantasy. There is definitely a lot of
apparent fantasy in here, but the story has much more to it than those
parts.

For me, possibly the most interesting aspect was the realisation that
Saleem Sinai was an unreliable narrator. This was just a suspicion at
first, he was so desperate to defend everything as true that I started
thinking he doth protest too much. And once that seed was planted it
became easy to read everything too ways: all the fantasy that Saleem
claimed could be explained entirely prosaically.

So I read the book with two interpretations. I don’t know which is
true, but I do know that for all his transparency Saleem is one of the
more intensely realised and interesting characters in fiction.